Hired Help

[CommanderKeith]

Hi,

I recently made friends with a fellow who used to go to university in mainland China but who is now studying in Sydney, Australia with me. We were talking about holidays & the cost of living in other countries & some-how we got on to the topic of average wages. He said that in China the average wage is about 10 ‘qua’ (or ‘yuan’ or ‘renminbi’) per hour which equals about US$1.20 per hour.

Well after telling him about the game I was working on as a hobby I asked him if he knew any uni students in China who would be willing to program for me to improve my game & he said that he was sure there’d be some who’d love to. Wouldn’t that be cool! Having someone help out to do stuff that you don’t have time for!

I was thinking that so long as the student was clever & a decent java programmer then $2/hr is a bargain, don’t you think? Even $2/hr to have some-one help to make and find art for my game would be awesome. And what a great deal for the student in China - get paid the average wage or more for doing the best part-time job in the world - programming games!

Apparently chinese students are proficient at writing English but not so good at speaking. That would be OK though since most communication would be over email. I haven’t thought through how they will be paid & how to deal with tariffs, workers compensation, taxes or anything but I would’ve thought thesew things could be ignored for such a small-scale operation… Transfering money to a bank account by direct-debit should work, or even mailing cash.

An Indian friend of mine tells me that India may be even better since they can all speak English very well & have lots of great programmers. The average wage in India is also very low, however my friend says that software developers are paid much better than the average wage. Still, I’m only looking for part-time help from uni students so they might be prepared to work for a rate I can afford.

Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Keith

[fletchergames]

I think you would be better off paying by commision than by the hour because you have no way to verify how many hours someone on the other side of the world is working. You should still be able to get a reasonable deal, assuming you find someone qualified who wants to work for you.

[CommanderKeith]

Good idea, so maybe make it like a tender arrangement. I know there are sites about where you can do that already, has anyone used them? Like www.rentacoder.com?

An indian friend of mine actually used to take up projects from there but by the sounds of it most of the coders like him mainly just did corporate stuff like e-commerce shopping trolleys, registration login, database setup, etc, not games. Games are different because they aren’t so formulaic. I’ll have to look into those sites more to see if there are any games coders.

[blahblahblahh]

Outsourcing is incredibly fricking hard, and unless you intend to make a career out of it AND you are a foreign national of the country you’re going to source to I would very strongly advise against it.

If nothign else, think how many other people have had this idea over the last 10 years and failed to make it work; the vast majority of those who made a bearable success were foreign nationals who came to business school in the US or UK, then went home and used their contacts from that to get contracts, whilst setting up the business at home.

Part of the problem is that it’s almost impossible to carry on any kind of business in the typical outsource countries, they usually lack the basic legal and financial systems to allow you to do it - so e.g. you’ll find that people will routinely steal code from other people and sell it on to you, or that it costs you twice as much to pay them as they receive AND it takes 4 weeks, because the banking system between you and them is so retarded.

so long as the student was clever & a decent java programmer, then…

Right. How are you going to find such people, and how on earth are you going to assess whether they ARE clever and decent programmers?

My suggestion: it’s a nice concept, but the only way its feasible is to find a foreign national friend willing to do a lot of legwork to make it work, and to be very careful not to overreach yourself.

Also, note that on rentacoder.com and friends tonnes of the code gets dumped for being crap, tonnes turns out to be plagiarised from other people, and tonnes is “sold” to the buyer, then “sold” to several other buyers at a lower price (seen this happen many times; if the perpetrators get caught, they get banned, but it happens a lot).

* blahblahblahh has been involved in this stuff for the past 5 years, on both sides and as an arranger/middleman

If you can get it sorted out, it works OK, but also note: indian and chinese developers are usually incapable of solving any problem that requires them to think about it. They can solve any problem that is already known how to solve, and do so very fast and reliably. So, you have to write VERY precise descriptions of what you want and invent every algorithm and - more importantly - every minor customization to every algo that you need.

[Mr_Light]

what blah^3 is saying is pritty much the same as what I hear from colleages and chats at meetings and events.

They can solve any problem that is already known how to solve, and do so very fast and reliably. So, you have to write VERY precise descriptions of what you want and invent every algorithm and - more importantly - every minor customization to every algo that you need.

It’s wierd though as I code more and have to write hours and try to make better and better hour estimates, I encounter situations where the proposed solution isn’t gonna work in a sence that it is an annoyance to work with(sure there ppl to check that, but they miss stuff from time to time or fail to grasp it between all the technical stuff.) now I could do it the way I know the client wants(well wants, I deliver somethign which they won’t complain about, but not as how they indicated they would want it) right away it’s not gonna be withing the set time. now if I write more hours they might not be bill-able. so I have to spend extra time implenting it the way as discribed so that they can see that it doesn’t work. and they they will be willing to cough up the extra bucks.

when I approch the client immidiately upon spotting the problem, I sometimes find that I can’t get it explained on the other end of the table(also for here we have ppl mediators etc). This is where I am actually face to face with ppl. now image yourself beeing at the other side of the world.

…hmm now that I’m finished typing this I feel I haven’t got my point across but well…

anyways, some interesting examples on how outsourcing can go wrong that I heared recently are:

“will product will be done in 3 months?”
-yeah!
<3 months later>
“is it done yet?”
-no.
“you said it would be done in 3 months?”
-yeah.
(turns out they factored vacantions in, and there was a 1 month vacation the product wasn’t delivered till after 4 months)

[CommanderKeith]

Thanks very much blah^3 & MrLight, I was really hoping I’d get some good insights like yours.

@blahblahblahh

Part of the problem is that it’s almost impossible to carry on any kind of business in the typical outsource countries, they usually lack the basic legal and financial systems to allow you to do it - so e.g. you’ll find that people will routinely steal code from other people and sell it on to you, or that it costs you twice as much to pay them as they receive AND it takes 4 weeks, because the banking system between you and them is so retarded.

I’ll look into that, but I’m reasonably sure that it won’t be a big obstacle.

so long as the student was clever & a decent java programmer, then…

Right. How are you going to find such people, and how on earth are you going to assess whether they ARE clever and decent programmers?

Also, note that on rentacoder.com and friends tonnes of the code gets dumped for being crap, tonnes turns out to be plagiarised from other people, and tonnes is “sold” to the buyer, then “sold” to several other buyers at a lower price (seen this happen many times; if the perpetrators get caught, they get banned, but it happens a lot).

I think I’ll steer away from rentacoder etc then & try to get a student who is prepared to get interested in it as a hobby too rather than just to make cash, like those on rentacoder.

If you can get it sorted out, it works OK, but also note: indian and chinese developers are usually incapable of solving any problem that requires them to think about it. They can solve any problem that is already known how to solve, and do so very fast and reliably. So, you have to write VERY precise descriptions of what you want and invent every algorithm and - more importantly - every minor customization to every algo that you need.

Let’s hope not… !

Thanks very much for these warnings, but I think it’s worth a go. I’ll let you know how it turns out. Whoever it is, I’ll point them to JGO so that they can get up to speed ;).